


Stork Club

by Pargoletta



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Childbirth, F/M, Fatherhood, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24853213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pargoletta/pseuds/Pargoletta
Summary: Daniel Sousa waits outside the maternity ward for his life to change.  Fortunately, he has company to help him begin adjusting to his new reality and his new identity.
Relationships: Peggy Carter/Daniel Sousa
Comments: 22
Kudos: 62





	Stork Club

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to this story! My family isn’t terribly big on Father’s Day, but somehow, this Father’s Day, inspiration struck. While there was a nightclub in Manhattan called the Stork Club (the one that Peggy and Steve imagined dancing in), the word also referred to the waiting room of a maternity ward, back in the days when fathers were not allowed into the delivery room. Daniel Sousa is terribly nervous, and who can blame him? His life will never be the same again . . . Enjoy the story, and I’ll meet you at the end.

**Stork Club**

“’Scuse me. I’m looking for a dashing university student and part-time science cop.”

The six men in the waiting room of the hospital maternity ward all looked up from fidgeting, smoking, shredding magazine pages, and pacing back and forth. A nurse held the waiting room door open, and Jack Thompson rolled his wheelchair over to one of the chairs where Daniel Sousa sat with a blank notebook in his lap. Daniel offered Jack a nod and a little smile.

“Jack. Thanks for coming.”

Jack shrugged. “When a brother calls . . . I’m not sure _why_ I’m here, but you called, and I’m here.”

Daniel huffed out a little laugh. “To be honest, I’m not sure why I called you, either. I guess I just didn’t want to be alone.”

Jack glanced over at the other five expectant fathers, who had resumed their previous nervous activities. “You couldn’t find anything in common with the company already here?”

“Maybe too much in common.” Daniel chewed on the end of his pen and thought for a moment. “I wanted someone I knew.”

“Fair enough.” Jack maneuvered the chair so that he could look Daniel in the eye without getting in the way of a bespectacled older gentleman who was pacing regular circles around the waiting room. “What about family?”

Daniel shrugged. “Peggy’s family is all in England. I called my family after they took Peggy away and I finished filling out the billing forms. Two of my sisters are coming down, but they won’t be here for a while. Then I called you. You’re right in town, and . . . we’ve been through things together. The three of us. I figured you’d understand.”

“Well, I don’t.” Jack focused his gaze on a new callus that was growing on his palm. “But you called. So I’m here.”

“Thank you, Jack. I mean it.”

They lapsed into a silence that was more comfortable than either one of them expected. Daniel wrote a few lines in the notebook, considered them, and added one more line. He signed his name and wrote _Friday, March 16, 1951_ in tidy handwriting below it, and then dodged the bespectacled pacer to put the book on the coffee table in the middle of the room. A very young man with a shock of red hair picked it up and leafed through it, pausing occasionally to read something that caught his eye.

“It’s called a Fathers’ Book,” Daniel told him. “It’s a sort of a diary. Everyone can write in it about what they’re thinking while they wait.”

“Thanks.” The redheaded man – not much more than a boy, Daniel thought, possibly even too young to have served, and wasn’t that something – flipped through a few more pages. He considered the notebook, and then began to search for a pen.

A woman’s screams filtered through the wall of the waiting room, and all the men froze. One man tore an old copy of _Field and Stream_ magazine in half. Daniel thumped his fist against his artificial knee, tipped his head back, and groaned.

“Easy there, pal,” Jack said. “You don’t want to break it.”

The woman beyond the wall howled again. “Does she sound like she has an English accent?” Daniel asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Jack fished around in his jacket pockets and produced a flask. He passed it to Daniel, keeping it out of sight of the other men with the practiced ease of a federal agent. “Here. You look like you need this.”

Daniel took a slug and found that the flask contained a surprisingly good bourbon. The alcohol burned its way down his throat, creating a tiny cushion between Daniel and reality. “I should have paid more attention to Tito last year.”

Jack reclaimed the flask and took his own swig before hiding it in his pocket again. “Who’s Tito, and why should I care?”

“My first little brother. Had his first kid last year, but I was busy with finals, and Peggy had a million things to do getting the new office set up. We sent a telegram, and we made it up to Fall River for the christening, but . . . I should have paid more attention to Tito.”

“Because that’s just what a man needs right then. Big brother to hold his hand and wipe his snot.”

Daniel smiled. “Thank you for coming, Jack.”

Jack chuckled, and the two of them lapsed back into contemplative silence. After a while, the door that led into the maternity ward opened, and a nurse appeared in a crisply starched white uniform. All the men in the room turned to look at her. “Mr. Wilbur?” the nurse asked.

The bespectacled man stopped dead in his tracks, took a deep breath, and followed the nurse into the maternity ward. As soon as the door closed behind him, Daniel heaved an enormous sigh. “Finally,” he murmured to Jack, pitching his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. “He was driving me nuts with all that back-and-forth.”

Jack let out a grunt, and glanced at Daniel’s crutch and his own wheelchair. “Jealousy ain’t a good look on you, Sousa.”

“You know, maybe calling you here wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

Jack scoffed, but passed the flask over to Daniel so that he could have another sip of bourbon.

Possibly an hour or two later – Daniel had thoroughly lost track of time – Mr. Wilbur burst back into the waiting room. “It’s a girl!” he cried. All the men applauded, and Mr. Wilbur produced a packet of cigars and began to hand them out.

“First baby?” Daniel asked, tucking his cigar away for later.

Mr. Wilbur shook his head. “Third. But the first girl. I’ve got Don and Paul at home to play catch with, and now Mary has little Susie to dress up.”

“That’s sweet. Congratulations.” Daniel pushed himself to his feet, as much to get the blood moving again as to shake Mr. Wilbur’s hand.

“There’s nothing quite like a little girl calling you Daddy,” a man sitting across the room said.

“That’ll be us,” Mr. Wilbur agreed. “Daddy and Susie. Evening, all. I’m going back in there to see to the missus.” He tipped an imaginary hat, turned on his heel, and marched back into the maternity ward.

Daniel returned to his seat and slowly settled himself in. “They sound pretty organized, having the name all ready like that.”

Jack guffawed. “You two having trouble with that?”

“A little,” Daniel admitted. “We’ve narrowed it down to a final list, but we haven’t decided completely.”

“You gonna name it after me?”

“Probably not.” Daniel smiled.

“Why not? Jack’s a good solid American name.” Jack spread his hands in front of him, evoking a theater marquee. “Jack Sousa. All-American boy, probably plays third base and, I don’t know, flies kites or something like that.”

“What if it’s a girl?”

Jack shrugged. “Jackie Sousa would look adorable in a frilly little dress or something.”

Daniel tried to imagine Peggy dressing any child of theirs in frills once it was old enough to walk. Somehow, the image failed to appear in his mind. It had already been strange enough to see Peggy wearing a maternity smock as she tried to manage the fledgling SHIELD office over the telephone while Daniel studied and did the dishes.

Another woman – or possibly the same one; it was difficult to distinguish muffled screams from one another – cried out beyond the wall. Somewhere behind the door, Peggy was in pain, and there was nothing at all that Daniel could do to help her. He had been there to hold her hand after she had fallen twenty feet onto rebar, and he had held her as she cried after receiving the deepest and most classified shock of her life, but he couldn’t be with her now, in an hour of what had to be equal need. He wondered if this might be a bad omen, if he might be doomed to be one of the many men he had known as a boy, who had worked all day to provide for their families, but somehow never really seemed to know their children.

He was startled out of his reverie by Jack snapping his fingers in his face. “Getting lost in your own head there, Sousa,” Jack said.

Daniel sighed. “I was just thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Peggy’s in there somewhere, in real pain, and I can’t do a damn thing for her.”

“She’s pretty tough,” Jack reminded him. “She can make it on her own.”

Daniel shook his head. “But she shouldn’t have to, that’s my point. As far as I know, Peggy’s never needed a man before in her life. She’s always chosen me. And I can’t even be there to hold her hand. Some choice I turned out to be.”

Jack said nothing for a while. His gaze turned inward, as if he were turning something over in his mind. As long as Daniel had known him, Jack Thompson had always given off the image of an elegant, patrician brawler. For the most part, Jack was in fact inclined to overestimate himself and disregard anything that lay below the surface of life, but Daniel knew that he did in fact have an inner life, when he chose to acknowledge it.

“Was your old man good to you?” Jack asked suddenly.

Daniel blinked. “Yeah. He worked a lot, but he always came home in the evenings. There was only one of him and seven of us, but he did the best he could.”

Jack nodded. “My old man put a word in Vernon Masters’s ear, got me the job at the SSR. I haven’t heard from him in the last four years. Guess he didn’t like how it all turned out.” His lips tensed into a thin, hard line for a moment. “You know, you were wrong.”

“About what?”

Jack glanced over at the coffee table, covered in magazines, overflowing ashtrays, and the Fathers’ Book. “That little notebook over there. You said everyone could write in it about how they feel about becoming a father. You were wrong.”

“Yeah?” Daniel shifted so that he could focus on Jack more fully, but Jack looked away.

“I can’t,” he said after a moment. “I ain’t having kids. One bullet took that away from me. I’ll never write anything in a Fathers’ Book.”

It wasn’t something that they’d ever talked about. Daniel had wondered, on occasion, but it just wasn’t something that men talked about with other men. He would have to think about this some more, to make this new information fit into his world, but that would have to wait. All the same, it struck him as a peculiar honor that Jack had confided in him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you do.” Jack sighed, and finally turned to meet Daniel’s eyes. “And the reason I’m telling you is not so you’ll feel sorry for me. If you do that, I’ll kick your ass. I’m telling you because you’re going to be a good father. You’re in here, writing in that little notebook, shaking that fellow’s hand and taking his cigar, worrying about living up to some ideal. You’ll do fine. Because, if you don’t . . .”

“You’ll kick my ass?”

Jack smiled. “Got it in one.”

“Be a bit of a challenge from that chair.”

“All I gotta do is grab that gimp leg of yours.”

They were still laughing when the door opened, and the same nurse who had called Mr. Wilbur returned. “Mr. Sousa?” she asked.

Daniel stopped laughing in an instant. He used his crutch to pull himself up, and thrust his arm into the cuff. “That’s me.”

“This way, please.”

Daniel took a deep breath and followed the nurse into the maternity ward.

Peggy reclined in a hospital bed, wearing the quilted bed jacket that Rose Roberts had given her for a wedding present. Her hair was combed and pinned back into a neat roll. She looked a little bit stunned and a little bit triumphant. And, cradled in her arms, she held a tiny infant.

“Daniel,” she said. “Oh, you’re here!”

Daniel hurried to her side as fast as his crutch would allow him. Peggy shifted so that he could see the baby’s pink, crumpled little face. “It’s a boy,” Peggy said. “This is our son.”

Daniel leaned in, entranced. He didn’t notice Peggy signaling to the nurse with her eyes, nor did he notice when the nurse brought a chair next to the bed. He sat down in it without thinking, completely focused on unwrapping the baby’s blanket to see his tiny hands and feet, the ten perfect fingers and the ten perfect toes.

“Our son,” he breathed. “We have a son.”

“I can hardly believe it myself,” Peggy said. “I remember being taken into the delivery room, and then it’s all a bit of a blur after that. But here I am. And . . . we have a baby boy.”

“Hello, little man,” Daniel said. “Welcome to the world. I’m – I’m your Dad.”

“And I’m your Mummie,” Peggy added. “Although I rather suspect he knows that much already.”

Daniel breathed out something that was almost a laugh. “He’s doing better than I am. It’s . . . whoa. It’s so much to wrap your mind around. That’s our _son_ right there.”

The nurse cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Sousa. Do you have a name for him? For the birth certificate.”

Peggy bristled a little bit at being called “Mrs. Sousa,” while Daniel stared at the baby’s face. Completely unbidden, a name appeared in his mind.

“I think he looks like a David,” he said. “What do you think?”

Peggy turned away from glaring at the nurse. “David? Why David?”

Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know. It just came to me. I think he looks like a David.”

Peggy considered the baby’s squashy features. “Michael.”

“Hmm?”

Peggy nodded. “David Michael. I want his middle name to be Michael.”

“David Michael.” Daniel considered the name. It was a good, solid American name, and his family would be pleased that one of the names was a saint’s name.

“You understand,” Peggy said. “Michael, for –“

“I do.”

“Mummie and Daddy don’t know,” Peggy murmured. “It would make them happy.”

“Good,” Daniel said. “It’ll make my family happy, too. And I’m happy. Are you happy?”

Peggy nodded, and pressed her lips together, clearly feeling unusually vulnerable in that moment. It was time for Daniel to step up and be a father now. He turned to the nurse.

“David Michael Sousa,” he said. “That’s his name.”

“Very good, sir.” The nurse wrote the name down on her clipboard. “All right. Mother needs her rest now. I’ll take David to the nursery. If there are any visitors, you can let the desk know, and they’ll arrange a viewing.”

She leaned down and lifted David from Peggy’s arms. Peggy’s eyes glistened. “David,” she called. “Don’t worry. Mummie’s right here.”

She did not relax until the nurse had closed the door behind her. Daniel shifted to sit on the side of the bed so that he could take Peggy in his arms. “He’s beautiful, Peggy. I’m so proud of you, and I love you with all my heart.”

“He’s only a few hours old, and I miss him already,” Peggy said. “But I’m so tired.”

“You worked hard. You deserve a rest.”

Peggy nodded and nestled a little closer. “There’s so much to do. We have to tell people, wire my family, make sure the nursery is ready. Howard will want to know, too, and the Jarvises.”

Daniel smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll get started on that. Gloria and Clarissa are on their way, and they’ll help, too. They’ll love having the chance to call people long distance.”

That got a little laugh out of Peggy. “Daniel?” she said.

“Hmm?”

“I think I have to sleep now.”

“All right.” He reached behind Peggy to fluff her pillow and helped her to lie down on it. Then he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed a few stray bit of hair away from her face. “You get some rest. I’ll make sure they bring David in when you wake up.”

Daniel leaned down and kissed Peggy thoroughly enough to show her how much he loved her, but not so hard that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. He adjusted the blanket and smoothed her hair one last time, and got up to leave.

“Daniel?” Peggy sounded half asleep already.

“Hmm?”

“Take care of David. He’s so little, and he’s so new.”

Daniel turned around in the doorway. “I will always take care of him, Peggy. I promise. He’s my son, and I’m his father. I will _always_ take care of him.”

“Good,” Peggy murmured. “I believe you.”

Daniel turned the light off and left the room. On his way back to the waiting area, he found a nurse and asked her where the babies went when they were not with their mothers. The nurse led him to a glass viewing window through which he could see rows of bassinets, each containing a swaddled baby. The nurse went into the babies’ room, located a particular bassinet, and brought the baby to the window. Through the glass, Daniel could see that it was David, and that David seemed content. The nurse put David back in his bassinet, and Daniel breathed out and allowed the knot of tension in his stomach to loosen.

He was a father. With every moment, and with each glimpse of David, it all finally began to seem real. There was a brand-new, tiny little life that depended on him, and the only thing to do was to rise to the challenge.

Daniel took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and headed for the waiting room, where Jack Thompson was probably finishing the last of the bourbon in his flask. It seemed like a lifetime ago that Daniel had been sitting there sipping from that flask with Jack, although he guessed that it had only been half an hour. But in that half-hour, he had become a completely different person. He was a _father_ , and it was time to announce that to the world.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to all who have read and enjoyed this story! David Michael Sousa certainly has a lot of adults ready to welcome him into the world and love and protect him.
> 
> There’s a good reason that Peggy doesn’t remember giving birth to him. This was the era of Twilight Sleep, in which laboring mothers were dosed with a combination of morphine and scopolamine that may or may not have had any impact on the pain of childbirth, but which did erase the memory of the whole event. Twilight Sleep was one of those things that was invented with good intentions, but the reality seems to have been pretty horrific. Childbirth has changed a _lot_ since the 50s, and that’s really not a bad thing.


End file.
